Warren Buffett turned 90 last weekend and many tributes have come out since highlighting his track record. Why wouldn’t they? It’s the best long term track record ever.

It starts with the 31.6% annual return during his partnership days from 1957 to an almost perfectly timed closure in 1968.

He followed that up with a stint at Berkshire Hathaway. Since he took control in 1965, its stock has achieved a 20% annual return…so far.

The chart below shows what a $10,000 investment in Berkshire in 1965 looks like. Continue Reading…

Growth stocks were in vogue by the end of 1972. The five most popular companies had a market cap of $100 billion on earnings of $2.2 billion.

$100 billion is nothing by today’s standards, but those five companies — IBM, Minnesota Mining (3M), American Home Products, Xerox, and Eastman Kodak — accounted for 15% of the total market cap of every company listed on the NYSE. They had an average P/E of around 40. The general view was their growth made them “safe.”

Therein lies a problem. Equating high multiples with “growth” is a common mistake made by investors. But making the leap from “growth” to safety compounds the error.

The skill is in separating growing companies from high multiple stocks that are rising in price. Because one meets certain characteristics that drive earnings growth over time. The other has only to do with price action. Continue Reading…

The popularity contest is alive and well in the stock market. The S&P 500 is at all-time highs, up 9.2% year to date. That’s total return, by the way. If that seems surprising in any way, you’re not alone.

On the surface, one might conclude that we’re in a raging bull market. The enthusiasm, the speculation, the day trading…all the ingredients are there.

A more nuanced answer is that there’s a bull market in a handful of names hiding a bear market in many more.

The largest companies in the S&P are performing exceptionally better than the rest. So much so, that it’s having an outsized impact on the index. The numbers are mindboggling really. Continue Reading…

In most games of chance, the odds are easily figured out. You can calculate the odds in advance for coin flips, dice throws (craps, backgammon), or a spin of the roulette wheel because each has a fixed set of outcomes.

Now take a game like the stock market. Calculating odds gets trickier because it adds complexity and uncertainty. The outcomes are no longer fixed and the number of variables to consider grows exponentially.

Unfortunately, human nature makes this worse. It turns out, we’re terrible at estimating probabilities. Our biases get in the way.

Our troubles begin with availability. A simple rule of thumb tells us to put higher odds on something that happens more often. Unless we have trouble remembering how often that something really happens.

The availability bias screws with how we estimate probabilities. When we weigh the probability of an event happening, our estimate is based on how easily we remember a similar event and how often we remember it happening. Unfortunately, how easily we recall something has more to do with recency, vividness, and personal involvement. Continue Reading…